U.S. approves civilian nuclear pact with Russia

U.S.-RUSSIAN RELATIONS

Peter Baker, New York Times

Published 4:00 am, Friday, December 10, 2010

While President Obama presses the Senate to embrace a new arms control treaty with Russia, another nuclear pact with Moscow secured final approval after more than four years Thursday with virtually no notice but potentially significant impact.

An agreement opening the door to greater civilian nuclear cooperation between the two countries cleared its final hurdle in Congress and will now take force in what Obama hopes will be another step toward strengthening the Russian-American rapprochement that has been one of his signature foreign policy goals.

The civilian nuclear agreement reverses decades of bipartisan policy and allows extensive commercial nuclear trade, technology transfers and joint research between Russia and the United States. It does not permit the transfer of restricted data, but it would clear the way for Russia to import, store and possibly reprocess spent nuclear fuel from American-supplied reactors around the world, a multibillion-dollar business.

The agreement was a top priority of Obama's predecessor, President George W. Bush, who opened talks in mid-2006 and sealed a deal with the Kremlin in May 2008. But he withdrew it from Congress four months later in protest of Russia's war with its tiny neighbor Georgia. Obama resubmitted it last May, saying that Georgia "need no longer be considered an obstacle" and citing recent Russian cooperation in trying to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.

President Trump addresses nation after mass shooting at Florida SchoolWhite House

While the agreement "has flown under the radar" compared with the debate over the so-called New START arms treaty, it "is potentially far more significant" for nuclear security and for Obama's reset policy with Russia, said Matt Rojansky, a Russia scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "It delivers on the promise of reset because it taps into fundamentally shared interests, benefits both sides and enables the U.S. and Russia to lead together on nuclear security," Rojansky said.

The civilian nuclear agreement did not require legislative approval, but Congress had 90 legislative days to reject it. Two resolutions of disapproval were introduced but not approved.